Media production is now an international industry. One project might involve production crews in the US, effects houses in London, editing services in Mumbai, and music production in Cape Town.

Cloud computing and digital asset management makes global collaboration more cost-effective, efficient, and practical. Data can be made securely available to participants wherever they are in the world. Access to expertise and talent is no longer artificially limited by geographical area. Media production companies can use cloud technology to take advantage of a global talent pool.

Effective media asset management is key to implementing reliable collaborative media production workflows. Cloud technologies work together to leverage the efficiencies inherent in infrastructure abstraction to radically improve the productivity of media projects that depend on multiple stakeholders being able access and manage diverse and complex collections of media assets.

Accelerated File Transfer

To work efficiently production companies need to be able to quickly distribute their assets and make them available to partners in collaborative projects. Traditionally, this was done by shipping hard drives, film reels, or other media, but that’s a slow, expensive, and insecure process. Until recently, it has not been feasible to upload assets directly to collaborators, but the advent of very fast Internet connections and cloud platforms that are specifically designed to facilitate the accelerated transfer of very large files has removed the necessity to rely on physical shipping of data. Data can be where it needs to be very quickly.

Storage And Access Control

Cloud technologies are fundamentally more secure than traditional file distribution methods. They offer a granular level of access control that gives individual participants the access they need and no more, without running the risk of valuable data falling into the wrong hands.

Creative Review

Back in the analogue days, the process of getting approval for project milestones involved either bringing the data to decision makers or flying decision makers to the data. By using a centralized cloud-based library of assets that all partners have access to, the creative review process can take place in real time.

Backup

Many media companies produce multi-terabyte files that are extremely valuable. The best case scenario in the case of data loss is expensive production delays. In more serious cases, data loss can result in companies closing down because they are unable to bear the cost of recreating their project files. The chances of data loss occurring are compounded if that data has to be distributed around the world on physical media. Cloud asset management technologies include backup and archival functionality that keeps data safe and practically eliminates the risk of serious financial impact from data loss.

Cloud-based digital asset management is a core component the global media production and post-production industries. The economic and creative advantages to using cloud platforms for digital asset management are compelling. ComputeNext Solutions for Media enables production companies to make the most cost-effective and flexible decisions when choosing cloud vendors to trust with their valuable data.